Shape & Weight

Yvonne as a model.

I wouldn't be honest if I didn't confess to knowing a French woman or two who was fat all her life. We had a great family friend called Yvonne, who reveled in food and wine more than almost anyone else I have known. What excitement it was, both vicarious and actual, to share a meal with her, which I did many times before her death some years ago at the age of eighty-four. Yvonne knew she was not svelte, but her shape did not develop from a loss of control. Particularly after eighty, she simply had learned to derive so much genuine pleasure from food and drink, such a sense of vitality, that the payoff of typical compensations didn't measure up in her mind. It wasn't that she was always gaining weight; she had of her own free will set her equilibrium higher than that of most women, and she loved every day of her life. She was unusual in body, but in her spirit she could not have been more French.

Mireille Guiliano. French Women Don't Get Fat.

And so for day 1780
28.10.2011